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Interesting English Language Facts And Trivia

Interesting English Language Facts And Trivia

Interesting English Language Facts And Trivias

The English language is the most studied second language in the world. It is widely used all around the world. Mainly for trade and commerce, world organizations official language and writing in general.

English is spoken by millions yet it is the only major language in the world that doesn’t have a language academy overseeing it. In spite of that, English continued to advance and still the most popular second language to acquire.

Although most of us already knows how to speak english, there are still words, phrases and terms that we don’t fully understand or know of. Below are 15 interesting facts and trivia you may not know about the English language.:

1. In 1945, Grace Hopper of Harvard university was working on a malfunctioning computer and found a moth inside the circuit and caused the computer to break down. Since then, the term “bug in the computer” is used whenever something goes wrong in your computer.

2. A person who studies caves is called a speleologist.

3. The words silver, month, orange and purple does not rhyme with any other words in the english language.

4. The word “set” has the most definitions compared to any other words in the english language.

5. The word “ultimate” is the last thing to happen, “penultimate” is next-to-last and “antepenultimate” is second-to-last.

6. The plastic material at the end of a shoe lace is called an aglet.

7. The ridges on the side of a coin are referred as milling or reeding.

8. An octothorpe is commonly known as the “pound” sign (#).

9. The dent between your nose and your lips is called a philtrum.

10. The ZIP in Zipcode means “Zoning improvement plan”.

11. You may have seen this sentence somewhere before – “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This is an example of pangram sentence. A pangram is a type of sentence that uses every letter in the english alphabet.

12. “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” is the longest word in English. It has 45 letters. It is just a type of lung disease caused by the inhalation of ash and sand dust. Mostly associated with volcanic ashes.

13. The words we always use or repeatedly used during conversation even if they don’t add meaning to what you are saying are called “crutch words”. Commonly used crutch words – “Actually”, “like”, “basically”, “anyways”.

14. There is name for the small dot in the letter “i” – a “tittle”.

15. Many wonder what this symbol is called (&). It is an “ampersand”. It is another version for the latin word “et” which means “and”.